Stranger Danger

 Lucy Peyton’s niece Sarah Jane Peyton

One of our Smith/Duncan grandmothers was Lucy Peyton. Lucy moved from Virginia to Mississippi in 1834. However, most of her siblings and their children remained in Virginia, including an unmarried niece named Sarah Jane.

Sarah, a spinster, lived quietly with her brother Randolph in the small town of Port Royal, Virginia. Here is their house today, boarded up and abandoned:

One ordinary Monday evening many years ago Randolph was gone from the house, leaving Sarah alone. Around dark three men arrived on horseback. One, a man named Willie, was known to Sarah. The other two were strangers.

Sarah Jane invited them in. Willie explained that the two strangers were former Confederate soldiers, one wounded, who needed a place to stay the night. Robert E. Lee had surrendered just two weeks earlier and the two soldiers were headed home.

Sarah Jane considered the situation. Her sympathies were Southern and she likely wanted to be kind to travelers but this situation would put her in a house with several unknown men while her brother was gone. She decided that they had to leave the house.

The men understood. Sarah Jane and Willie discussed options and agreed that the party should try the farm house of Richard Garrett, about two miles away.

The men remounted their horses and left, moving down the road to the Garrett farm. Farmer Garrett allowed the three men to stay the night in his house. The next day the farmer told the men to sleep in the barn that night and then move on. The men bedded down in the barn.

That night, well after midnight, riders arrived at Garrett’s house, looking for two men. Garrett told the riders that there were two travelers sleeping in the barn. The riders dismounted and surrounded the barn that contained the two strangers who earlier wanted to stay at Sarah Jane’s house.

The rest of the story is well-covered by American history books. The riders, who were federal cavalry, surrounded the barn. They ordered the two travelers to leave the barn and, when one of the travelers refused to come out, they set the barn on fire. The reluctant traveler, trapped in a burning barn, finally came out with his pistol drawn. The soldiers shot, hitting him in the neck.

They placed the mortally-wounded traveler on farmer Garrett’s front porch where, several hours later, the mysterious traveler, John Wilkes Booth, died.

Farmer Garrett suffered from housing John Wilkes Booth. The fire destroyed his farm equipment and supplies, his means of feeding his large family. He became a public villian and his family said he suffered emotional wounds that never healed.

I imagine that cousin Sarah Jane, and the Peyton family in general, was thankful that Randolph had not been home on April 24, 1865.

Teeny-Tiny Tattle-Tales

 

Clues come in sizes large and small. The smallest source of ancestry clues, microscopic DNA, can give us hints about the origins of our ancestors.

I’ve had my DNA tested and, if (like me) you’re a descendant of Smith/Duncan or Greer/Russell, I can tell you a few things about the 50% or 100% of ancestors you and I share.

• 99% of my ancestors came from Northwest Europe (British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia and France).
• There’s no Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, African or other non-European.
• There is little indication of Italian, Greek, Spanish or other Mediterranean Europeans. Britain, Germany and Scandinavia were the homes of my ancestors.

That same Northwest Europe background applies to the 50% (or 100%) of the genes you got from your Smith/Duncan or Greer/Russell ancestors.

I was hoping for some Indian blood, or Attila the Hun. Oh well.

DNA provided one final tidbit, this one about Stuart Smith’s ancestry.  y-DNA is what males inherit from their father, so I have Stuart Smith’s type of y-DNA. My DNA test showed that I (and Stuart Smith, and his father, and his father’s father and so on back hundreds of generations) have y-DNA that’s called “E-V13”. E-V13 is most commonly found today in Albania and Greece. What’s up with that???

In a nutshell, Albania and Greece were sources of Roman soldiers and craftsmen. There are concentrations of E-V13 in the parts of Britain that had Roman soldiers and craftsmen two thousand years ago. So, a reasonable guess is that the original Smith male in Britain was likely a Roman soldier or craftsman. The “original” Smith probably arrived in Britain as part of the Roman invasion about two thousand years ago.

Who Cares about Dead People?

That’s a fair question. Why should anyone be interested in people who died many years ago? After all, there are lots of interesting people around us who are still breathing.

As I see it, a look at our predecessors is a chance for us to learn a little more about ourselves, to help us put ourselves and our world “in context”. Our ancestors and their world largely shaped us and our world. Learning a little about our ancestors, their characters, choices and world, helps us learn a little more about ourselves.

Also, seeing how our portion of the world has changed might give us hints about where it, and we, are headed.

Finally, there’s a sense of connection, a sense of family, that often arises from knowing a little of the lives of those who came before us. We are part of a family that spans time, stretching across the past and into the future, including those we never knew and those of the future we won’t live to see. We are family.

 

I’ll try to keep this interesting.